Letter from the Editors

An original text is the unseen counterweight to its own translation, matching its dimensions under the surface of the page, reaching back into its own artistic traditions and cultural history while the translation stretches out toward new contexts and creative possibilities. Languages themselves, of course, contain within them the collective past of a linguistic community, but translation is also a generative process bringing a text, as Walter Benjamin described it, into its own fertile afterlife. Translation produces an ever-widening network, a branching array of artistic creation, but it also, one could argue uniquely, remains firmly connected to a nutritive root system that is inevitably invoked in every twig.

We could not have imagined, when we selected the theme for this issue of eXchanges, the amazing variety of ways in which the theme would emerge in the submissions we received. Centuries-old Chinese and Japanese poetry, translated respectively by Emily Goedde and by Stephen D. Miller and Patrick Donnelly, brings the past into the present, while Alex Cussen’s translations of modern Chilean poetry set in ancient Rome carry the present back into the past. Cussen is translating the work of his own father, Antonio Cussen, offering a concrete representation of how translation provides literature with offspring that live and breathe in other languages and cultural contexts. That organic division and differentiation is also manifest in Bernard Scudder’s English and Kristof Magnusson’s German translations of Sigurbjörg Þrastardóttir’s Icelandic poetry. Kelli Boyles’s translations of Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, a poet from Madagascar who wrote in French, and Puja Birla’s translation from Hindi of an essay that ponders the place of Hindi in contemporary India, provoke compelling questions about the troubling legacy of colonial power and its effects on a nation, not just politically and economically, but also linguistically and literarily. These and the other texts in this issue, then, interact with our theme in intriguing and sometimes surprising ways.

As an art rooted in other texts, in other cultures, in other worlds, translation brings us something unparalleled in our own, and pushes our own literary production to branch out in new, exciting forms. The translations in this issue both reveal traces of their own origins and hint at innovative possibilities for artistic creation. We are proud to present them to the English-speaking world.

Andrea Rosenberg
Mary Bryant
Iowa City, November 2008